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Cathedral Studies

Some sound advice from Post-Nietzschean: When listing the central organs of the modern structure, be careful not ignore the PR industry, post-vocational higher education (“crapademia”), and para-administrative organizations (“NGO-i-stan”). This type of sociological concreteness represents an important theoretical development pathway.

I left this comment on the original post, but it’s still awaiting moderation, so I’ll reproduce it here to correct a mild factual error to his otherwise wonderful analysis:

Very good analysis of the lower and middle levels of the Cathedral. I just want to offer a mild corrective to your depiction of “crapademia” in the US. The US university system basically has three tiers: elite national universities (usually private), “state schools” which are funded by the state where they are located and usually offer lower tuition to students from that state, and community colleges. What you describe as “crapademia” describes the middle tier, the state universities, not the community colleges in the US. The community colleges in the US are still basically vocational schools, and they don’t even have graduate schools; many of them don’t even offer four-year degrees, but only a two-year “associate’s degree”. The faculty at such schools may be very leftist, but they have basically no influence or credibility as spokespersons, and many of them are just glorified high school teachers. The faculty and grad students at State U, on the other hand, tends to exhibit exactly the characteristics that you describe of crapademia.

Without a doubt, crapademia in the US is overwhelmingly leftist, and in the most embarrassing of ways. But it isn’t as bad about free speech from my experiences — I think this might be a crucial US vs UK difference. My alma mater definitely belongs in the ‘crapademia’ category, and I worked very hard to be very lazy when I attended. I basically got a useless liberal arts degree and took the most overbearingly leftist brainwash courses because they’re exceedingly easy. I wanted to be able to work less on schoolwork and have more time to read my own books privately.

I never once compromised my morals or pretended to think something that I didn’t actually think. I would often directly antagonize the professors, write papers on offensive subjects speaking from various obscure and hard-to-pin-down right-wing stances, and openly mock leftism during class discussions. I delivered a speech for their annual multicultural conference which was a blatant Swiftian satire that made a mockery of the event and the ridiculed the premise of multiculturalism (Tim Wise was the keynote speaker). I even once caused a professor to leave the room 20 minutes before class ended, presumably to go cry. She later wound up writing a recommendation letter for me to attend grad school. I graduated magna cum laude.

If I can characterize crapademia in the US regarding dissident opinions, I’ll actually go ahead and say that the professors love intelligent students who refuse to buy into their agendas. They’re mostly very, very bored people who have given up on life and thirst for students to actively engage them, as long as their opinions aren’t easily classifiable (that is important). They signed on to be college professors because they thought they would change hearts and minds for the greater social good, but instead they found that most of their students are cynical lemmings who parrot whatever they say, often in a poorly-thought-out, perfunctory manner. The students are great, honestly, because they see the game for what it is. Their parents are clueless middle-class schmucks who want them to go to college “just ’cause,” and they think, “Oh man, my dad is paying for me to live in an unsupervised area where I can party every day,” so they do just that. In their minds, regurgitating some drivel about equality and tolerance is a small price to pay for the amount of great and wonderful memories they’ll have with their friends. However, their teachers aren’t too happy about any of it.

Sadly, some of the information sticks for our formerly apathetic party animal students. I suppose they come to associate leftism with success and intellectual maturity (they notice that their professors don’t regularly do kegstands, even if they pretend as if they might in a pathetic attempt to appear approachable), and that’s about when they become assimilated to the borg (or whatever). But undoubtedly, some of the students get radicalized in the other direction. Usually — because these students lack the sufficient intelligence to articulate their heretical views — they wind up going off and stewing in resentment. In fact, resentment might be part of the reason they get radicalized in the first place. Either way, as their beliefs intensify, they become increasingly meek and harmless as they grudgingly prepare for a lifetime of non-influential wage slavery. The whole process of school is so mechanical and factory-like that they will get pushed through the system, even if they do something like get in trouble for ‘hate speech’ and/or lack the right charisma and plausible deniability to win over their professors, as I did. Most of these people wind up just getting jobs doing whatever, and that’s that.

This is no reason to get discouraged, though. They’re out there all the same, and more and more of them will populate society and eventually gain positions of minor prestige, particularly as whites become more and more of a minority. They won’t be ivy league educated – lousy, lazy, disenchanted colleges will serve as their entry point into higher avenues of discourse. Fissures in the wall of crapademia will let in some unwanted cockroaches just as fissures in the wall of the ivy leagues occasionally let in some rats. We’ll see how long it takes to make for a full-blown infestation.

This is an absolutely brilliant post. Several PhD students seem to post intermittently on NRx message boards, leading me to believe that some of us will invariably end up slipping into crapademia and beyond.

Interesting. Consider my priors adjusted. I only have second-hand experience of crapademia but I do hang around in a lot of liberal and progressive circles, and it turns out they *are* pretty open-minded, in private at least, so I can believe what you see. Maybe the right-leaning folks who encounter hostility in such circles are the ones who expect to receive hostility, and start ou looking for a fight

Hmm, NRx gets a lot of its energy from perceived oppression by progressives. It’s harder to stand for something when all your opponents are nuanced freethinkers. Then again, it’s hard to believe that everyone is a nuanced freethinker when wrongthinkers are being fired all over the place.

One possibility: is the trick of the Cathedral that many individual ideas are socially permitted, but leftism is the only socially permitted coherent ideology?

I agree with both possibilities you’ve raised: first, that the people who receive the most hostility are the ones who start out cagey and defensive; and second, that coherence is a big, big part of the whole equation. One of the reasons I performed well was because I genuinely had no idea what I believed in; everything was a reaction. I’d say things like, “We all ought to begin the project of finally destroying Western Civilization once and for all! And we should start by ridding the world of crying white liberals — easily its most obnoxious feature!” No one really understood how to take that. It’s a very sinister and hurtful comment on the one hand, but on the other, it could pass for something ironic that you’d expect a zany French post-structuralist to say. This is why I don’t think anyone who chose to suffer my nonsense was a nuanced free-thinker at all; I just think they were having fun trying to figure out the puzzle.

I do think that there is a very real tendency to ‘burn at the stake’ some quasi-autistic people who are innocently making observations, but this sort of thing is much rarer than NRx/alt-right/whatever people seem to think.

In the US, the students who have the most difficulty typically have some sort of noticeable, clear-cut attachment to the ideals of “Old America” (or whatever) and will likely have Republican parents. They want to identify with real groups that hold their values. They think primarily in terms of people, not ideas. They also tend to fall for many of the tricks that conservatives fall for, so their biases are laid bare for a full-scale mental surgery. This is all very unfortunate, because politics depends on herd mentality to a great degree. That shouldn’t ever change. But a genuinely intelligent, free-thinking person shouldn’t have to worry much about incurring flack for crimethink in the same way that those people do.

So it’s not wrong per se for people to argue that the University environment is oppressive; it’s just somewhat of a red herring. The real problem with the University environment, at least with crapademia, is that it’s massively hypocritical. The teachers present themselves as “fun” and “cool” people and do everything they can to try to mask the very real power structure inherent to any classroom, because “you catch more flies with honey” etc. They know damn well that they’re trying to make their students think a certain way, and they also know that they’re developing their teaching style to facilitate the process as efficiently as possible. I talk to these people on a regular basis and it’s obvious. NRx/alt-right/whatever people shouldn’t see that as oppressive; they should see it as a source of weakness and attack it like rabid dogs. The nicest representatives of the so-called Cathedral should be treated with the most outward hostility.

Not burned out, more bored, if anything. Many of the more mature neoreactionary bloggers seem to have gone intentionally quiet (Isegoria, Foseti), and the younger generation seemed to be slipping into self-referential solipsism.

I am young, too, and I realised that writing, especially writing that analyses politics and society, is a game for wise and mature 40-somethings, not energetic and brilliant 20-somethings.

Our host is one of the few neoreactionary blogs I still subscribe to, hence this post popping up on my feed today. I must say, I think a lot of the NRXNy ‘sophomores’ would benefit from less babbling to each other on Twitter and more wider reading. Plato, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Evola – they would all have hated each other but they will all be effective mental wingmen against the ideasluts and memewhores of progressivism. A reminder that ‘reaction’, most broadly defined, is not a single philosophy but a gateway to the whole universe of philosophies outside of 21st-century Western educated feelgoodthink. For people alive today, Paul Graham, Thiel and Taleb are must-reads. For online writers, John Michael Greer and David Chapman are highly recommended, in both cases for their ‘perspective on perspectives’.

Oh, and if anyone reading this has read (and actually put into practice) Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, CONTACT ME (postnietzschean@outlook.com). Imagine having not one but two rare insights into the nature of reality revealed to you – raising the dizzying (and hopefully false) possibility that I might be one of the few remotely sane people on this planet.

Hmm, maybe I should start writing more. I realised that I like Quora because my mind is a briny solution of meta-concepts and meta-theories, and questions from strangers are the much-needed string around which my thoughts can crystallise On that note I’ve just signed up for ask.fm (ask.fm/postniet) and would greatly appreciate your nousthreads (of any shape) upon which I can endow my crusty layer of memes.

As my blog suggested, I’d previously been using strong emotions as the motivation to write stuff, but contra to my blog I’m actually a fairly mellow person and so this rarely works. (My poor real-name alter ego also occasionally tries to start writing in public, but having to avoid telling the truth sucks all the fun out of it). Though I’d be quite happy to fire up the blog again and write some more long-form articles if there’s any topics anyone would like me to go deeper on.

If you’d like to fire up the inquiries again go where few NRx have gone before and never directly: Finance. It’s the equal of government itself and overwhelmingly leftist/Cathedral.

The reason our youth vote Leftist in the USA is they are debt slaves, the vehicle for this is student loans. That’s a crucial difference between America and Europe. For the core American political conflict is they have conquered a world Empire but not their own lands.

Debt Slavery is collected in the US by Finance, and Finance will always be backed by the Fed. In truth soon “Finance has always been backed by Fed/Treasury. It is wrongthink heresy to conceive otherwise.”

Without Finance the USSR never exists and doesn’t survive the first failed harvests in the 20s – and all the harvests failed every year. Without Bill Casey Reagan doesn’t get them to cut the monies off in the 80s hence leading rapidly to collapse. Without Finance the Rape of Russia doesn’t become the vehicle by which Clinton administration corrupts and privatizes the Cathedral as one with Finance, Treasury/Fed, Foreign Policy, Harvard all sitting down with the Russian Oligarchs in the 90s. Without Finance there is no Government Sachs or Housing Crisis. Without Finance the entire thing collapses, and without Fed/Treasure* Finance collapses in minutes.

“The American Economy and the End of Laissez Faire” series of lectures, starting with the first one at the bottom (“The Civil War and its Legacy”) and finishing at the top (“Politics and the Power Elite”).

Rothbard doesn’t get every single detail exactly right (a fact that causes the modal Cathedral academic to wave him dismissively away), but he gets far, far more right than you’ll get from Cathederal sources (including aforementioned modal academic ones).

If you really want to understand how finance “capitalism” married the Cathedral, and why, I know of no better starting point.

P.S on stuff like this, as with many others, the job of the modal Cathedral academic (with deep personal sincerity) is to lead the “debt slaves” out of the Platonic cave of ignorance about this situation. . .and into an even deeper cave. To guide them to become Cathederalite Ultras, not at all to guide them to turn against the Cathedral.

Many students do have an inchocate awareness they’re being jobbed. But the usual response is apathy. Which the Cathedral does not like (it wants fervent throngs – it *does* get enough of those), but apathy is not an actuall challenge for it.

Only autodidacts among the students have any chance of escaping both the cave and the deeper cave. I do try to encourage that, and in my comments on papers lead them on breadcrumbs to “alternative sources.”

I have my doubts how many follow those up. Few people are going to birth NRx like Athena in their heads. Indeed all the more active NRx-istas found it by reading beyond the spoon-fed Approved Sources. By being autodidacts. The average party-animal/future-drones-of-america-club-vice-president is less likely to do that.

But yes, yes: that is no reason to not keep plugging away in the hopes of reaching the Nockian Remnant.